


grooves

by YourPalYourBuddy



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: F/M, First Kiss, One Shot, Suggestive Themes, introspection on past relationships, lardo's sketchbook
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:53:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28365708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YourPalYourBuddy/pseuds/YourPalYourBuddy
Summary: A light rain drums against the window behind him and he turns involuntarily, quietly thankful they’re already at the Haus and don’t have to walk back from her studio in the rain and in the dark. He’s been there once or twice with her and Holster to help her move canvases and set up for her art shows, but it’s always been more Shitty’s place than his own. There had never been a reason it should be otherwise.Now, though—“Leave your head like that,” she says quietly. “The light’s loving your neck like this.”______________________Lardo/Rans, from Rans' POV during a sketch session :)
Relationships: Larissa "Lardo" Duan/Justin "Ransom" Oluransi
Comments: 8
Kudos: 18





	grooves

**Author's Note:**

  * For [annabeehive](https://archiveofourown.org/users/annabeehive/gifts), [birlcholtz (justwhatialwayswanted)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/justwhatialwayswanted/gifts).



> MASSIVE shoutout to Allison for kicking this off & to Birl & everyone in the groupchat last night, I for one am loving riding this wave :)

________________________

Rans asks once she’s all set up, her feet up on her desk and looking at him with her sketchbook propped open on her knees. He says it to diffuse the moment; he’s unbearably aware of his shirt unbuttoned, of the fact that he’s sitting in her bed, of how her gaze is sharp and questioning at the same time as if drawing him is a problem she’s trying to solve. And who knows, it might be. Lardo had told him earlier how she got so used to drawing Shitty that she never bothered to ask anyone else. And now that Shitty’s graduated—

“Of course,” he’d said at the time. He just hadn’t been thinking about what it would feel like for one of his closest friends to be looking at him like she’s trying to dig him out of the earth in the moonlight. 

He clears his throat. He turns his head from side to side to stretch out his neck. He asks, “What happened with you and Shitty, anyway?”

Her pencil lead breaks. She twists it to a point with a handheld sharpener. “What d’you mean?”

“You know what I mean,” Rans says. Lardo’s frowning at her sketchbook now, and he’s about to say _never mind, sorry,_ when she raps her sharpener against the trash can and then makes several broad sweeping strokes on the page. 

All she says is, “Are you okay taking your pants off? You don’t have to, up to you.”

“I’m good with whatever,” he says. He leaves his jeans folded neatly on the floor. There’s a moment where he pauses before realizing he’s waiting for her to chirp him for folding his jeans the way Holster would have and has, actually, made fun at almost every moment. He’s glad when she just adjusts her desk light instead. 

Aside from the moon, it’s the only light on in her room. He adjusts his collar. He thinks she’s watching the way the fabric floats around his body out of the corner of her eye. 

The clock ticks by and he sits back against the wall, making small last minute adjustments that will hopefully make it easier to stay still for however long she needs him to. For a little bit, he thinks about his own classes compared to hers and falls down a rabbit hole about the cost of repetition versus the cost of creation. And then his foot falls asleep, and he’s trying to think of ways he can move it without fucking up her drawing. 

“I’m drawing your head and torso if you need to wake up whatever just fell asleep,” she says, squinting at him. “Figured it might be nearly time for part of your body to have fallen asleep.”

He says, “Okay.” If he pretends his chest has been stuck in concrete then he might have a shot at staying still. He gently massages his foot the way those bugs stuck in amber might try to massage their feet if they were still, somehow, alive after all this time. 

The scritch-scratch of pencil on paper is soothing enough and her bed is comfortable enough that Rans starts drifting off after twenty minutes. He does his best to fight it. Lardo starts lightly nudging his leg with her foot. 

“What’re they doing to you in pracky that’s wearing you out so bad,” she says after the fifth time. 

“Like you don’t know.”

She hums. “We can stop if you want. I can take a photo and work from that, that’d be fine.”

“I’ll be alright,” he tells her. He’s betrayed by a yawn that makes him scowl and makes Lardo smile a bit. “I’ll probs stay awake better if we talk, if that’s okay?”

“Yeah, that’s fine,” Lardo says. She taps her pencil on her chair in a staccato beat. “Nothing happened with me and Shitty.”

Rans blinks. “Back up. What?”

She flexes her fingers, shrugging. “I dunno. It just — didn’t.”

“But you guys are perfect for each other,” he says. “We all thought — we didn’t ask in case it was something more than—“

“You ever meet those people,” she says, looking at him with a subtle tension in her jaw, “where you’re like, ‘fuck I’m glad I know you now,’ and you both kinda have a thing for the other person but you’re friends first, and also you both realized too late and then it was too late to change anything, so now you’re like ‘fuck if I’d met you in five years we could’ve been something, but I didn’t,’ and now you just have to live with it?”

Has he met people like that? Sometimes Rans thinks he _only_ meets people like that. He’s got Holster’s sweatshirt piled up on Lardo’s bedside table and Holster in his room with yards of frustrating conversations behind them.

“Yeah,” he says, “I’ve met people like that.”

“Well. That’s me and Shitty.”

He considers this. “Shit.”

“That’s one way to put it,” Lardo says. She’s quiet a moment, twirling her pencil between her fingers. 

A light rain drums against the window behind him and he turns involuntarily, quietly thankful they’re already at the Haus and don’t have to walk back from her studio in the rain and in the dark. He’s been there once or twice with her and Holster to help her move canvases and set up for her art shows, but it’s always been more Shitty’s place than his own. There had never been a reason it should be otherwise. 

Now, though—

“Leave your head like that,” she says quietly. “The light’s loving your neck like this.”

Rans looks back out the window. There are, he knows, about twenty or so major arteries in the body. Most of them are covered by his shirt, but he’d bet his carotid is pretty obviously exposed in this position, and she’s an artist. If his heart is beating as fast as he knows it is, she can probably tell. He pokes at the root of his elevated heart rate for a moment. It’s not anxiety; that’s not usually paired with this floaty weightlessness in his stomach, that feeling’s usually—

“It’s Holster for me,” Rans says. His mouth is dry. “What you were saying before about timing, that’s him and me.”

He needed to say that instead of _I know we don’t do this but I kinda wanna kiss you, is that weird?_ And almost everything else is on display, anyway. He can nearly feel grooves left from her sketches on his skin. There’s no reason the fact of him and Holster shouldn’t be too. 

Lardo says, “I kind of thought so,” and Rans wants to look at what it means for her to say that. Wants to see if it’s a quiet realization or a sharper, slightly jealous one the way his was when she told him about Shitty. It feels — silly, almost, to be feeling like this, they’re just friends, he’s just helping her out, they’re not RansomAndLardo, LardoAndRansom the way he is with Holster. 

He sneaks a peek out of the corner of his eye and with a jolt sees that Lardo’s looking at him with her sketchbook hugged to her chest like she’s just neatly solved the problem and now wants to sit in knowing the answer. She looks almost uncertain; there’s a softness to her mouth that shows up when she wants to do something but is talking herself out of it, and Rans sort of wants that softness in her mouth on his own. 

Slowly, he turns to face her. She doesn’t say anything about the fact that he’s out of the new pose. Slowly, he takes off his shirt, taking a moment to fold it and rest it on his jeans. She doesn’t say anything about the fact that he’s nearly naked. 

“Is that okay?” he asks, second-guessing. 

“That’s fine,” Lardo says. Her voice sounds hoarse. He watches her clear her throat as she look him up and down, lingering here and there on his biceps, shoulders, thighs. Their eyes meet. She says, “It’s very, very fine.”

Rans says, “Where do you want me,” and she says, “Do you wanna make out?”

She squeezes her eyes shut immediately, grimacing. “Sorry, that’s a weird — you don’t have to — can we pretend I didn’t just say that?”

He almost falls standing up from the bed. He catches himself on his desk and she looks up, mouth still soft and eyebrows still scrunched together, and he gently eases her sketchbook out of her hands. 

He says, “I don’t want to pretend I didn’t hear that.” He says, “We don’t have to if you don’t want to. I know this would change things between us. But I want to, if you do. At least this once.”

“At least once,” she says.

Her words are something like a whisper. Rans sets the sketchbook on her desk and sits back down on her bed, hoping she’ll see it as an offering of space if she needs it. He looks back out the window.

She makes a strangled sort of noise and he looks at her in alarm and she’s putting her pencil down deliberately and saying, “The light, Rans, I told you the light loves you like that, it’s unfair is what it is,” and he’s about to say something about how the light looks in her hair and eyes and on her cheek when she starts sliding off her sweatpants and he can’t speak anymore. 

“I just figured you’re on one layer and I’ve got four, it’s not really fair, is it?” 

“It’s not fair at all,” he says, feeling almost lightheaded. She smiles and her nose scrunches. She doesn’t fold her shirt when she takes it off. 

Lardo, on the bed looking like that. Lardo, her hips under his hands, pushing his shoulders until he lies down. Lardo saying, “When I was sketching you, this was going like crazy,” and pressing gently on his carotid artery like she’s taking his pulse. “Still is.”

Rans trails his fingertips up her side and she shivers, leaning into his touch, and he finds her carotid and does the same. “So is yours,” he says, and tucks her hair behind her ear. “And — Lards, you still have one more layer on than I do.”

“I was gonna let you take it off yourself,” she says. “If you wanted.”

He wants. He takes off her bra and kisses her until he forgets tonight’s the night they had their first kiss because it’s also the night they have their fifth, tenth, twenty-fifth. There’s a vague awareness that this should be weird because they’re such good friends. He thinks maybe that’s exactly the reason it’s not. 

“I’m glad I know you now,” he says afterward. The way she’s resting her cheek against his chest means he says this into her hair. 

She says, “Me too.” She says, “Do you wanna see the sketch?”

“Can I draw one of you first?” he asks, and he knows it's the right thing to have asked by the way her nose scrunches up in a smile. She hands him her sketchbook and he opens to a new page, using the moment as an excuse to see her the way she was seeing him. 

It’s a stick person drawing and he shows her and it's “you really got my essence, can I hang this up?” and she’s laughing the way she does when she’s sleepy and happy and everything all at once, and he’s laughing the same way, and it’s easy. He’s never really known it could be easy like this. Lardo kisses him for the twenty-sixth time and Rans doesn’t want to let go of how easy it is to lean over and kiss her back. The way she’s holding his face means maybe he doesn’t have to. He hopes she knows he’s saying the same thing back. 

Rans says it outright when they wake up in the morning. There’s a little too much hope in his voice even for him; it’s hard to look at her and say these things in case she says no, and he tells her this too. 

In response, Lardo kisses his nose. She says, “It’s a date, then,” and when he opens his eyes the window has her framed in light. 

The light loves her like this. He tells her so. 

________________________

**Author's Note:**

> aaaaa thanks for reading!! y'all I'm! having a lot of feelings about them rn :')
> 
> lemme know what you think in the comments or [come find me on tumblr!](https://ivecarvedawoodenheart.tumblr.com/)


End file.
